The founder of the Cardano project, Charles Hoskinson, expressed doubts about the future of Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization in the world. He believes that the network may not withstand competition over the next 10-15 years.
This is reported by Finway
“They have the wrong accounting model, the wrong virtual machine, and the wrong consensus model,” Hoskinson stated during an AMA session.
Hoskinson noted that the main threat to Ethereum comes from the L2 solution ecosystem, such as Arbitrum and Optimism. He believes that these networks, instead of solving scalability issues, are actually siphoning value away from the main chain.
“Layer two solutions are more like parasites—they suck all the profit from the main chain. Instead of unification, we see fragmentation,” he emphasized.
Other experts share a similar view, including Ye Zhang, co-founder of the L2 network Scroll, and Kane Warwick, founder of the Synthetix and Infinex projects. Hoskinson compared the current situation with Ethereum to the decline of giants like Myspace and Blackberry, which failed to adapt to new realities.
Moreover, he expressed doubts about the current governance structure of Ethereum’s ability to cope with increasing pressure, noting that co-founder Vitalik Buterin will find it “increasingly difficult to keep everything together by sheer willpower.”
Crypto analyst Alessandro Ottaviani characterized Ethereum as a “falling knife” in the crypto market, while analysts from Santiment linked the decrease in network fees to a reduction in the number of users performing transactions.
Despite the existing problems, the community is looking forward to the Pectra update scheduled for May 7, as well as Fusaka, which could significantly improve the network’s scalability and efficiency. Buterin is even considering accelerating the rollout of updates.
At the same time, former Ethereum blockchain developer Eric Connor believes that the network has the potential to become key in the decentralization of artificial intelligence due to the transparency provided by smart contracts, embedded micropayments, and decentralized incentives.
It is worth noting that Buterin recently also discussed a proposal to replace the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) with RISC-V architecture.